Worthing Visited by a Harry Potter Star

Worthing was visited by a celebrity today, and not just any celebrity, either: he’s starred in the Harry Potter films. Having set up a stall in Worthing market in order to receive his fans, Billy charged the modest fee of £5 for devotees to have their photograph taken with him. Or, more specifically, to have their photo taken with him sitting on them.

Incidentally, Billy is an owl.

As his sandwich board proudly advertises, Billy was one of the many delivery owls seen in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001) and its sequel Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002). Keen to share the magic, Billy, an 18 year old European eagle owl, is taking some time off from movie making and is instead touring the country making public appearances for his doting fans.

However excited we were to have a movie star in our midst, the copywriting team here at Fresh Egg couldn’t help but be distracted by some of the copywriting faux pas in his advertising spiel.

He is an owl, so we’ll let him off for the most part, but the board by our feathery friend’s stall misuses apostrophes, quotation marks, hyphens and also uses excessive capitalisation. On Billy’s website, the situation is much the same, with spelling and grammatical errors as well as the use of capitalisation with wild abandon.

Copywriting flaws aside, Fresh Egg clubbed together to pay for SEO wizard Alex Murray, whose birthday it is today, to have his photo taken with the famous bird. As you can see, Billy certainly delivered.

Have you seen Billy the owl in a town near you? Let us know in the comments below and share your photos on Twitter using the #BillytheOwl hash tag.